Archive

We drink wine because it gives us pleasure. Yes, it is that simple (and I didn’t come up with this – I learned it from Kevin Zraly, maybe the best wine educator in the world). We are looking for pure and simple sensual pleasure in every sip of that white, pink or red colored liquid in the glass, and, of course, it makes us happy when we find it.

When it comes to giving pleasure, I have to state that Rosé has an unfair advantage. We start drinking with our eyes, and while white and red have to compete for our attention with creative labels or sometimes even bottle shapes, Rosé takes a lot more simplistic approach – it just stands in front of us – naked. Clear bottle, nothing to hide – here I am, and I know I’m beautiful, so yes, do look at me and feel free to admire.

I don’t know if colors have universal meaning around the world – for instance, red is typically associated with danger or daring in the Western world – and red is the color of luck in China. So the pink color is usually associated with love and happiness in the Western world, and this is why the bottle of Rosé is so good at driving our emotions, no matter what shade of pink it actually boasts.

Acceptance, appreciation, and demand for Rosé stand at all times high today – and it continues climbing to the new “high” every year. Rosé still has a stigma of “summer wine”, but this is slowly changing as people start recognizing how much pleasure every sip of good Rosé packs, and how versatile it is with food – I would dare to say that in its food pairing versatility, it can well compete with Champagne, which is very hard to beat in its pairing range of cuisines from traditional Chinese to fiery Indian, sublime French, or big and bold Texas BBQ.

Today, Rosé is made everywhere – literally everywhere in the world. It is hard to find a winery which didn’t add Rosé to its repertoire. But before Rosé became so fashionable, there was Provence. More than 90% of the wines made in Provence are Rosé, and then they’ve been practicing for about thousand years, so Rosé is really a way of life in Provence, which is easy to see once you take a sip from the glass. I might surprise you with a choice of a close contender to the dominance of Provence – and they are not at all if you will think about the production volume – but when it comes to the taste, Rosé from Lodi in California will easily give Provence a run for the money.

Just look at these colors! Don’t they scream “pleasure”? The Provence Rosé in this picture is only for the color reference purpose, was not part of the tasting

Ever since visiting Lodi in 2016 for the Wine Bloggers Conference, I use every opportunity to confess my love to the region. Lodi might be one of the best-kept secrets in California wine. While a lot of wineries and regions are contemplating their approach to sustainability, Lodi grape growers already developed so-called Lodi Rules (now being analyzed and copied in many regions) for sustainable viticulture, and they have the certification program in place to ascertain that rules don’t just stay theoretical. What starts in the vineyards, continues in the wineries, and the result is simply better wines.

Most of the times Lodi is associated with Zinfandel. Of course, Zinfandel is one of the best known and important grapes in Lodi, but on a big scale, Lodi is a home of the Mediterranean grape varieties – Albarino, Grenache Blanc, Carignan, Grenache, Syrah, Tempranillo and many others, made into delicious, perfectly restrained wines. Lodi goes beyond just the grapes – we need to talk ancient grapes here. lodi is home to some of the oldest in the world plantings of Carignan and Cinsaut (Cinsault), original Mediterranean varieties, also planted on its own rootstock (phylloxera doesn’t survive in Lodi’s sandy soils). Definitely another level – and should be a subject of a separate post.

I had a pleasure of tasting 5 different Rosé for this post – two from Lodi and 3 from Provence. One of the Lodi Rosé is coming from Markus Bokisch, truly a master of Spanish (yes, Mediterranean) grape varieties. Second Lodi wine is produced by Estate Crush from ancient vines Cinsaut, from 130 years old vineyard. Provence wines are coming from two estates owned by Provence Rosé Group – two wines from the Château de Berne, the estate tracing its origins back to the 12th century. The last Provence Rosé is from the Ultimate Provence, the experimental estate which combines traditional Provence with urban design. Before we talk about the wines, just look at those Provence bottles – each one is practically the work of art, uniquely appealing beyond just the color.

Here are my notes:

2017 Bokisch Bokisch Vineyards Terra Alta Vineyard Rosado Clements Hill – Lodi (13.6% ABV, $18, 80& Garnacha, 20% Tempranillo)
Beautiful salmon pink color, very delicate
Fresh tart strawberries on the nose, medium intensity, touch of Meyer lemon
Strawberries all the way on the palate, the wine is definitely more present on the palate than any from Provence, a touch of sweetness, medium body, good acidity, very good balance. Refreshing and quaffable. Sweetness significantly subsided on the second day. Outstanding.
Drinkability: 8-, will be perfect with any spicy food.

2016 Estate Crush Rosé of Cinsaut Bechthold Vineyard Lodi (12.5% ABV, $21, 100% Cinsaut, 130 years old vineyard)
Bright strawberry pink
Strawberries and caramel on the nose, even the toffee flavor, sweet condensed milk. Caramel and toffee are mostly gone after first swirl and sip 😦
Nicely restrained palate, a touch of strawberry with very high lemon acidity and Long, acidity-driven finish – I keep salivating for about 30 seconds already. This will compete neck in neck with any Provence wine
Drinkability: 8, excellent. This wine also perfectly passes room temperature test.

Is summer the best time of the year? Well, I love all seasons, but with the right weather, summer might be the most enjoyable. Can we enjoy it “better”? Of course – with a glass of Rosé in your hand.

There is something special about the Rosé. We eat with our eyes first, and we drink that way too. If you think about color of the white wine, you get the range from literally a clear water to a dark gold – white wine is fun to look at, but the color of it doesn’t provoke much thought, unless you are in a blind tasting setting. Similar story with the reds – the color goes from the bright ruby to literally black, but again, the color doesn’t bring that much of the visual pleasure.

Rosé is a totally different game. The shades of pink go from the onion peel to salmon to copper to electric pink, and just a visual effect of the bottle of Rosé is appealing and uplifting, it says “the world looks a little bit better now, isn’t it”? We don’t always carry around those pink-colored glasses which improve our life’s outlook, but the bottles of Rosé can have the same effect. Who is with me? Yep, go pour yourself another glass.

So we agreed that Rosé itself can make our summer better. Can we further improve that? Of course! With the help of Wines ‘Til Sold Out, commonly known as WTSO. WTSO provides tremendous service to all of the wine lovers – it finds great wines at amazing prices – and passes savings to all of us. To make our summer even better than it is, WTSO is offering a special Côtes de Provence Rosé 4-pack collection, which you can find here.

I had an opportunity to taste these wines and here are my impressions:

What do you think of Côtes du Rhône wines? Côtes du Rhône (I like to call them CdR for short) are some of my favorite home wines. A “little brother” of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, they often offer similar, may be a bit less expressive taste profile, usually at a fraction of a price. They are also quite versatile with food, offering a wide pairing range, from lamb to game to cheeses.

I was reminded today of how good these simple CdR wines can be. While traveling (I’m in south of France at the moment, near Nice), I asked for the local red wine at the restaurant. Red Provence (that would be a true local wine) are made in a very minuscule quantities, so it is not surprising that restaurant at a small hotel didn’t have any. I was offered to look at the wines from the neighboring territories, such as Côtes Du Rhône, and I ended up picking the cheapest wine on the menu. It so happened that 2013 Antoine Ogier Artesis Côtes du Rhône AOC (14% ABV, €21 at a restaurant) was an excellent choice. The wine had red fruit on the nose with a touch of lavender, very soft tannins on the palate, soft and silky profile, plums, touch of minerality and excellent acidity, overall very balanced. After about 30 minutes the wine also showed tobacco and touch of pepper on the palate – a very classic profile overall. Drinkability: 8-

What was even better than just a nice glass of wine was that wine worked perfectly with food – this was an accidental success, as I didn’t think about the wine at all while ordering the food. The wine paired spot on with the Rabbit Pate, elevating each bite. It did the same thing with Grilled Veal with Creamy Mushroom Sauce. Believe it or not, but it was not even disturbed by an interesting dessert – a Pineapple Carpaccio (called on the menu “raw marinated pineapple”) with Lime Sorbet. All I can say that this was probably one of the most versatile wines I ever had – kudos to the winemaker for crafting such food friendly wines – I guess 155 years of history mean something.

Before we part, I want to live you with a couple of curiosities. Below you will see the back label of that bottle of wine, providing sulfates warning in 21 languages (I already shared that on Twitter). I find this interesting and a bit ridiculous (sorry – wine always contains sulfates, and no, they don’t cause the headache). The second picture shows an extremely thoughtful presentation of the condiments. I shared this on Twitter too, noting that I like the classy presentation, something which French mastered perfectly, only to be ridiculed by someone asking me if ketchup is a French food. Of course it is not, but think about how many times you were presented with the bottle of ketchup at a restaurant, only to think “where should I put it to – on the plate or directly on the fries” – by the way, both are equally uncomfortable choices? In this case, the problem is solved in the best possible way – here is your personal bottle, and you don’t need to deal with any puzzles, just enjoy your food.

Voilà! I’m done with my “notes from the road”. If you are in US, happy few last hours of the Labor Day holiday weekend. Until the next time – cheers!

So tell me, dear reader – do you think Rosé is for summer, or is it a year-around wine? In January, when it is –10 outside, would you still reach for Rosè to drink with your dinner? No, you only need heavy reds, you say? But why? Your dinner menu doesn’t consist of 5 variations of the hearty beef stew, and so the wines you drink shouldn’t be just Cabernet Sauvignon from 5 different glasses.

Well, I think the real picture is not as bad as I’m hinting above. The same way as now literally every winery in the world added Rosé to their repertoire, wine drinkers developed better appreciation for Rosé, its light and playful character, and ability to complement wide variety of dishes.

And which region makes the most versatile Rosé? Provence, of course! Yes, Rosé is made everywhere nowadays, but when it comes to finesse and character, Provence Rosé is hard to beat.

I recently had an opportunity to taste the line of Rosé wines from Domains Roger Zannier, and it happened to be a great lesson in diversity of Provence Rosé.

Domains Roger Zannier Rosé line up consisted of three different wine, each one having its own unique personality. In a blind tasting I would never tell that the wines were made by the same producer. And the main quality – while extremely quaffable, these wines offer food for thoughts, they are asking you to focus and to figure out what you taste.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

For what it worth, below you will find tasting notes for the Domains Roger Zannier wines – I hope the notes will illustrate my point:

What do you think we will be talking about today? Typically the “pink glasses” is just an expression, an allegory; we use it to say that all is good in the world. But sometimes those allegories can materialize, for instance, in the form of Rosé tasting.
Rosé is Rosé is Rosé. Rosé wines became extremely popular over the last 3–4 years. Nowadays, almost every winery I know of added at least one Rosé to their repertoire, if anything, to be available at least in the tasting room. But then there are those who started it all, for whom Rosé is a way of life and not just following the fashion and consumer demand. I’m sure that by now you figured that I’m talking about Rosé wines from Provence in France.

The Provence wine tasting I attended a few weeks more than two month ago was dedicated to all of the wines made in Provence, not just Rosé. However, if we will look at the stats of wine production in Provence, 89% of those wines are Rosé, 7.5% are red, and 3.5% are white, so it is no wonder that Provence is typically associated with Rosé. Total wine production in Provence in 2014 was about 177 million bottles. To give you more numbers, there are about 600 producers and 40 negociants in Provence. Overall, 9% of the wines produced in the world are Rosé, with the general trend of producing drier wines (particularly Provence Rosé has less than 4g of residual sugar per liter of wine). Provence is the largest region in the world dedicated to production of the Rosé wines. Also, France is the biggest producer and consumer of the Rosé wines, and U.S. is the biggest consumer of Rosé outside of France.

Provence was a cradle of winemaking in France, starting from the 600 B.C. in the area around Marseille. It is easy to understand why the wines were “rosé” in its style – maceration in contact with skin was simply not used, so the wine was produced from the juice which the grapes were “bleeding” after harvest, which would have a pinkish color. Today, the Rosé is produced in the very similar way as for the thousands of years, allowing only brief period of the skin contact. Most of the Provence Rosé are produced from Grenache, Cinsault, Mourvèdre, Tibouren, Carignan and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Provence Appellations. Source: Wikipedia

There are three main appellations in Provence, and one of those main appellations has four sub-appellations (you can see them on the map):

Côtes de Provence AOP

Côtes de Provence Sainte-Victoire AOP

Côtes de Provence Fréus AOP

Côtes de Provence La Londe AOP

Côtes de Provence Pierrefeu AOP (First vintage in 2013)

Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence AOP

Coteaux Varois en Provence AOP

Now, let’s talk about the seminar and tasting. In the seminar, we tasted 5 different Rosé wines from the different sub-appellations, as well as two reds. To be entirely honest, I didn’t find the dramatic differences between the wines from the different appellations – they were all Rosé wines, and I liked most of them (I’m a sucker for a good Rosé).

The tasting consisted of 65 different wines, out of which one was white, 7 were red, the the rest (57) were Rosé. What I really liked about this tasting was a very unique format. Nobody was pouring the wines for you. All the wines were standing on the tables in the middle of the room, each wine having a sticker with the number on it. All the numbers were corresponding to the wine descriptions in the tasting booklet. Everybody were walking around and pouring the wines for themselves. The winery representative were all on hand, available to answer any questions. However, because of self pour, there was no need to wait for anyone to pour the wine for you, no need to stand there for 2 minutes, patiently waiting until the person pouring wine would finally notice you – here you could go at your own pace, and it was really convenient. I like this system a lot more than a traditional tasting.

For what it worth, below are my notes. I didn’t taste all 65 wines, but it was something close to it. I used my traditional tasting event rating system with the “+” signs, where “+++” means an excellent and highly recommended wine. All the wines listed below have at least “+++” rating, with the few even exceeding that. I also included additional comments where I had them. Grape composition is provided for all the wines, and suggested retail prices are indicated were available. Lastly, all the wines which don’t specify AOP come from the Côtes de Provence – all other appellations are included as part of the names. Here we go:

All in all, this was an excellent tasting. I don’t know if there is ever a bad year in Provence, but I definitely liked lots of 2014 Rosé, and I think you will too. Also, if you will have an opportunity to try a Provence Red – don’t miss it, those wines are definitely worth your attention. Happy Provence Rosé (and red) hunting! Cheers!

Do you really think I managed to get face time with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt? Or at least a Skype interview? A phone call? Yeah, none of the above, you are correct. But – as it was announced a while back, they joined the ranks of celebrity winemakers with the release of their first wine from Château Miraval, a property in Provence, which they acquired a few years ago – and considering that they both participated in the tasting and selection of the final blend, I think the title of this post stands as appropriate. Well, yes, they didn’t make the wine all by themselves – they got some serious help by partnering with Marc Perrin of Château de Beaucastel in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, so the wine officially lists Jolie-Pitt & Perrin on the back label.

Miraval Rosé

Before we will talk about the wine, I want to mention that Château Miraval has very interesting history – in the 1970s, it belonged to the famous jazz musician Jacques Loussier, who converted the chateau into the recording studio. Many famous musicians, such as Pink Floyd, Sting and others, used that studio to produce their albums.

Now, let’s get to the wines. While celebrity status of winemakers is nice, in the end of the day, I care about content of my glass. So in this particular case, I wanted to have some frame of reference – of course in the form of another wine. As Miraval Rosé comes from Provence, I wanted to compare it with another Provence Rosé. Looking at the wide range of Rosé available, my eyes stopped at the label. Whispering Angel. I think I heard it somewhere. And it is from Provence. Problem solved – I got my second Rosé, and the battle (okay, it is only two, so let’s call it a mini-battle) of Rosé was set.

Then I found out that I have chosen well. It appears that Whispering Angel Rosé was a hit of 2012, and it was literally impossible to get it last year. Thus it was very interesting to see how the two will fare, and how the arrival of the Miraval might affect the cult status of the Whispering Angel.

Whispering Angel and Miraval side by side

Now, before we get on to the wines themselves (didn’t I say it already? yes I did, sorry for the interruption once again, but please read on), I need to let out a little rant. When I visit a winery’s web site, I’m doing it because I’m looking for information. Information for me includes history of people, story of the winemaker, information about vineyards, but most importantly, I want to know about the particular wine made at that winery. I want to know what grapes went into the wine, how the wine was made, what winemaker thinks about wine, and so on. Anything and everything which winery is willing to share about the wine, I’m willing to read, but (ahh, my finger is dancing above the Caps Lock key – I’m not going to press it only because I really respect you, my readers, but read rest of this sentence in the loud voice) – I’m not looking to read four praising quotes from the different sources and none, zero, nada, zilch of any actual information about the wine. The wine I’m talking about here – Whispering Angle. 4 quotes on the web site – and no wine information to be found anywhere. Yes, some of those quotes are wine tasting notes from the critics – but you don’t even know what vintage is being described. Yes, I do find it very annoying. End of the rant.

Now, let’s [finally] get to the wines. Here are the two wines side by side:

Whispering Angel and Miraval, now in the glass

2012 Whispering Angel Rosé Caves D’Esclans Côtes de Provence AOC ($17.99, 13.5% ABV) – supposedly a blend of Grenache, Rolle, Cinsault, Syrah and Mourvedre – the reason I say “supposedly” is because I didn’t find this information at winemaker’s web site or the back label – see the rant above.

Literally non-existent color in the glass. Pretty intense nose, more on the sweet side, with some tropical fruit (uncommon for Rose?). On the nose, it is more white wine than a red wine. Opens with the degree of sweetness on the palate, but as wine warms up, the sweetness disappears. After the wine opened up a bit, the palate is almost insignificant – there no traditional strawberries and onion peel. The wine is pleasant, but behaves more as indistinct white. Drinkability: 7

2012 Miraval Rosé Côtes de Provence AOC ($21.99, 13%ABV) – a blend of Cinsalt, Grenache, Syrah and Rolle. Syrah was vinified by saignée (bleeding, the pink juice is collected separately instead of leaving the juice in contact with skin for the short period of time), and the other varieties were direct pressed. 5% of the cuvee was aged in the oak casks.

Here are the tasting notes: Nice rose color, more intensity that the previous wine. Some strawberries on the nose, no sweetness. Nice density on the palate, more strawberries, very round but with the character. Drinkability: 7+

Time to conclude our small Rosé competition. I would give a small edge to Miraval, it was a bit more interesting. Miraval Rosé was good, but – it was not a wow wine I can’t live without. In that price range ($20+) there are plenty of interesting Rosé, lots of options are available to the curious palate in need of refreshing sip – in other words, I don’t think I will be specifically rushing over to the store to pick up whatever supply is left for either one of these Rosé.

Before we done here (I know, I keep testing your patience), I want to mention an excellent Rosé post by The Armchair Sommelier (I hope you discovered and follow her blog already, if not – fix that problem immediately). One of the dishes in that blog post looked so good and simple – Grilled Avocado with melted cheese – that I asked for the recipe (very easy – take avocado, make some holes with the fork, smother with the hot sauce, cover with cheese and broil for 5 minutes). I made it to accompany my Rosé and the dish came out perfectly and was very enjoyable, especially with the wine.

Grilled Avocado with melted cheese

Now it is the time to conclude for real. Until the next time – cheers!